A new day Mount Sinai

On a cold desert night, a group of trekkers set out for the summit of Egypt's storied mountain

By Kris Kotarski, For the Calgary HeraldNovember 19, 2008

We set out at midnight. Crammed into a nondescript white van, we pulled into the well-lit police compound long after the sun had set over the Red Sea but only moments after our driver casually let it slip that we must collect 35 Egyptian pounds (about $5) for another passenger.

"Government man?" I asked playfully, fully aware of the answer to come.

"Special policeman," I heard in reply. "You are foreigners . . . he must come."

Most of us had been through this before -- when travelling long distances in Egypt, foreigners are usually given an escort, in part to keep an eye on our contact with citizens and in part because the chaotic Egyptian economy needs every make-work project it can get.

After a long wait, our "special policeman" emerged from the enclosed barracks, dressed in a well-tailored suit, a pair of polished black loafers and a fashionable tie.

"In the middle of nowhere, an Egyptian James Bond," quipped one of the Americans with a wry smile, as our minder settled in next to the driver. "Arab coffee -- shaken not stirred . . . ."

A wave of subdued laughter briefly resonated through the van, and even our guardian angel (now wealthier by 35 pounds) broke into a practised grin.

Happy that someone broke the ice, our driver offered his own brand of wisdom.

"We laugh, and we go."

The scene was perfectly surreal. With the full moon hanging low in the desert sky, we set out westward through the barren expanse of the Sinai Peninsula, weaving and climbing on an empty desert highway.

Atheists, spies, Muslims, Christians and Jews, we were all modern-day pilgrims battling to stay awake in hope of sunrise from the summit of biblical Jebel Musa, the Mount of Moses, Mount Sinai.

Although the location of the biblical peak is disputed by scholars who offer possible sites across the Arabian Peninsula and the Levant, in Christian tradition, the 2,285-metre peak situated on the southern edge of the Egyptian Sinai Peninsula is accepted as the site where God gave Moses the commandments.

Located in the Saint Catherine Protectorate (a national park of sorts), Mount Sinai offers beautiful views of the surrounding mountain range and towers over the world's oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastic community, originally commissioned by Saint Helena, mother of Constantine the Great, the first Christian ruler of the Roman Empire.

We first set our eyes on the ancient Monastery of Saint Catherine around

3 a.m., having bid goodnight to our driver and our minder who, satisfied that we could only communicate with God and not with any subversive elements, left us to climb the mountain on our own.

With the moon hidden somewhere beyond the jagged mountain stone, we were surrounded by darkness. The monastery stood silent before us, its ancient walls guarding treasures and secrets that had survived centuries of dust, wind, fire and marauding armies.

The monastery can trace its roots back almost 1,700 years, when monks first began congregating around the fourth-century Chapel of the Burning Bush built by Saint Helena. The monastery expanded in the year 527, on the orders of Emperor Justinian, the lawmaker whose code is the basis for much of the western world's legal tradition.

Another lawmaker, the Prophet Muhammad, sent the monks the Charter of Privileges in 628, outlining the protections for Christians living under Islamic rule. In the ancient document, signed by Muhammad himself and still present in the monastic library, the ruler of the nascent Islamic Caliphate covered aspects of human rights, including such topics as the freedom of Christian worship and movement, freedom to appoint their own judges and to own and maintain their property, exemption from military service, and the right to protection in war.

At 3 a.m., contemplating the centuries of history was easy -- gearing up for a sprint up Mount Sinai was not. With less than three hours to go before sunrise, our international melange began to sort itself into natural groups based on fitness level and sensibility.

At the very back were two Jewish-American teenagers who, ignoring the protests of their Israeli friends, crossed over from the Israeli resort of Eilat to satisfy their curiosity about Egypt. They were nice, funny, and stoned (mainly hashish, but also LSD). They looked around nervously when I explained why "no drugs in dictatorships" was a good rule to live by, and eventually fell in with a group of French tourists, one of whom was visibly drunk and trying to hire a camel from a Bedouin tourist guide.

Jamaal from Cairo and Moussa from Kuwait were slightly ahead -- they began their climb quickly, happy to be free from the gaze of our "special policeman." Still, we passed them after 30 minutes or so, when they slowed to smoke cigarettes, their lungs heavy and their enthusiasm waning.

With me was Alex the Hungarian, a 30-something former European discount airline executive with enough stock options to "retire for a while," and Claude, a 40-year-old teacher from Montreal who had quit his job, sold his house and made his way across the globe with his wife and two kids. I was the youngest, and the slowest. I was also the least practical, lacking a proper torch to illuminate my path up the mountain, which left me at the mercy of the two men, one of whom admitted to doing triathlons to stay in shape.

There are two ways up Mount Sinai: 3,700 "steps of penitence" carved into the mountain directly behind the monastery, and a camel path, which allows a little less penitence but a longer trek. On our way up, we opted for the latter, saving our penitence for the daylight hours. We were eager to explore the monastery, as well, although that would have to wait until morning.

First, we lost sight of the walls, their daunting outline disappearing behind us into the night. We raced past eager guides and their camels, past Jamaal and Moussa, and past other groups of pilgrims, ranging from 20-something backpackers to ancient grandmothers, slowly making their way up the mountain on a pilgrimage of a lifetime. We raced ahead at a brutal pace until there was no one in front of us, until we could look down below and see a hundred bobbing lights slowly making their way up the mountain, getting closer to the summit one switchback at a time.

Drenched in sweat on a cold desert night, we ran for almost two hours, watching the sky nervously for the first milky signs of dawn. The path narrowed, and each turn seemed sharper than the last. The beams of light from the torches illuminated the jagged rocks beneath our feet, but with everyone else out of sight, we were completely alone, suspended between the starry sky and the abyss below.

The scene was empty, and the mountain where Moses spoke to the burning bush was silent, with only our footsteps sending muffled vibrations into the night. It was past 4:30 a.m. and the moon had disappeared beyond the horizon, leaving only a faint outline of the summit, a dark mass peering out from behind the boulders in our path.

Finally, our trail narrowed to a trickle and we merged with another path, a narrow corridor of stone steps snaking their way toward the heavens. This was the ancient path of the monks, where penitence was paid and where we made our final push into the darkness of night.

We did not ascend the summit first -- sitting there, waiting for us, were enterprising Bedouin, with water and blankets for a modest fee. They smiled wide "gotcha!" smiles, knowing that our limbs were tired, our clothes were drenched, and that we could not resist "renting" blankets for the price of fine dinner elsewhere in the protectorate.

Sitting alone, huddled against the whistling wind and the cold desert night, we shared our dried fruit and water and we strained our eyes to the east, where we soon began to see a faint reddish glow, slowly creeping up against the darkness of the night.

Before the summit began to fill with weary pilgrims, before we exhausted our memory cards with photographs, and long before we would take the 3,700 treacherous steps down the mountain, we sat transfixed, watching the valley below slowly flood with morning light.

On our way down, we would nap under a boulder waiting for the monastery to open, we would photograph the timeless bush enclosed within its walls, and we would recoil at the pile of skulls of dead monks looking at us from an ancient ossuary.

We would marvel at the ancient icons, some of the oldest in all of Christendom, and we would admire the beautiful mosque standing within the compound next to the chapel that has seen the rise of Christianity, the rise of Islam and the Crusades.

But before all that, we stood up and we looked to the east. There, on the ancient summit, crowded now, but still silent as the pilgrims considered their lives against the barren landscape, we looked past ourselves and into the magnificent light.

Before life could begin anew, we looked once more into the eternal sunrise.

Almost Done!

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